


give me a bullet; i'll show you a gun

by redonthefly



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Agent Carter References, Angst and Humor, Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America: The First Avenger, F/M, Gen, World War II, peggy and howard are bros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-08
Updated: 2015-06-08
Packaged: 2018-04-03 11:59:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4100167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redonthefly/pseuds/redonthefly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Margaret Carter, who was called Peggy Carter by most everyone except her mother, and who was Pegs to a few close friends, did indeed find something interesting to do, because she was cleverer than most and sharp witted and also exceeding stubborn.</p><p>This is Peggy Carter's war story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	give me a bullet; i'll show you a gun

**Author's Note:**

> contains: mentions of canon typical violence, fairly handwave-y WWII history, and slightly contradictory timelines (thank you so much Marvel). Though this mostly follows the events the The First Avenger, there are elements from Agent Carter and the MCU companion comics as well. For purposes of this story, Peggy was born in 1919.

Around the time she was 16 or 17, Margaret Carter got the idea in her head that she would like to try her hand at doing something interesting with her life. It wasn’t as though she was dissatisfied with the status quo, such as it was, being a teenager in London in 1936 was its own definition of interesting what with carrying a gas mask around in her purse and drawing on the lines of her hose with an eyebrow pencil.

Except that it wasn’t; she wasn’t - the world, as she was hearing more and more each day, was a much bigger place than England. She was bored out of her skull.

When she told her mother this, on a typically damp morning over stale biscuits and weak coffee, her mother nodded seriously and turned over the page of her newspaper to the crossword and inquired about 33 Across. Peggy swallowed, dusted the crumbs off the front of her shirt, and excused herself to the living room, where she rang the operator, was connected to a house four blocks down and cancelled her evening plans with the pretty boy who lived there.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, twirling her finger in the phone cord, “but something’s come up.”

Something, indeed.

Margaret Carter, who was called Peggy Carter by most everyone except her mother, and who was Pegs to a few close friends, did indeed find something interesting to do, because she was cleverer than most and sharp witted and also exceeding stubborn.

When she was 20, she had a wardrobe full of army green wool, a coat with medals pinned smartly to the breast of it, and a position in the Secret Scientific Reserve, which was not only terribly exciting, but also reasonably dangerous; Peggy found that she greatly preferred her life to balance on the edge of exciting and dangerous. It kept her sharp and alert and in motion; Peggy could not abide to languish, which made her choice profession all the more appropriate.

“We’re going to Austria,” her CO told her one afternoon, and prodded at a stack of paper on his desk. “Hitler’s already crazy scientific division went off the rails and kidnapped a Jewish scientist for his research. We’re going to get him back.”

Colonel Chester Phillips was tall and brusque, chewed on cigars but didn’t smoke them, was as strictly no nonsense as a person could possibly be, and as Commanding Officer (and a human) Peggy liked him more than she cared to let on.

“We’re sure he’s one of ours?” Peggy asked, picking up a briefing on the top of the stack. It was printed in code, but emblazoned with the figure of a skull with eight legs; Hydra, she thought, and shivered.

“Better well be,” Phillips grumbled. “We don’t want anyone else to get their hands on his work, that’s for damn sure.”

Peggy replaced the paper to the stack, and folded her hands behind her back. “And what am I to do for this?”

The look Phillips gave her was almost mischievous. “How much do you know about the medical field, Agent Carter?”

So, a nurse.

“Well we can’t all be secret agents dear,” Claudia said cheerfully, pushing a half open surgical packet into Peggy’s hands, then reached up and adjusted the white cap in her hair. “I labeled those for you when I heard you’d be coming down here,” she added absently, then turned back toward the nervous looking serviceman who was sitting at her station, and snapped on a fresh pair of gloves.

“I’m a _secretary_ ,” Peggy said, and promptly dropped the needle driver.

Claudia chuckled. “You’re Col. Phillips’ secretary, Agent Carter. You don’t get all those pretty colors for shuffling paper now, do you?”

Peggy played a nurse, albeit with a gun and a hemostat (surprisingly useful for picking locks), and when she pulled Dr. Erskine, battered and gasping on too-thin limbs, stumbling into the darkness outside of Castle Kaufmann, it was to a bold clear sky and a canopy of stars.

*

On her 22nd birthday, her colleagues toasted her good health with bootleg gin from inside the converted bowels of the London underground during a particularly nasty air raid.

She didn’t mind exactly - the Blitz had seen the British Army and Intelligence Services (as well as the majority of the citizenry) turn an almost blase attitude toward the wail of the siren, for after all, what could be done about it, except to endure? - but the thundering and shaking kept interrupting the officer’s chorus of ‘God Save the Queen’, and it made balancing on the table more difficult. Then again, so had the gin which long since ceased to burn in her throat - she was warm and fuzzy around the edges, and full to the brim with war cake and, weirdly, pickles, which she ate as prim as possible, and licked the salt off her lips when no one was looking.

“Three cheers for good Peg,” shouted one of the officers, and he lifted another glass, and others were raising them around her, catching the light from the single dim, bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and glittering around her like a chandelier, and Peggy Carter turned 22 while dancing a jig on the top of a battered and much abused table, grinding her heels into the wood and pretending that she was stomping on Adolf Hitler’s nose.

*

Peggy never took up smoking as a real habit; she disliked the taste for one thing, and hated the stains that cigarettes left on her fingers, but there was something to be said for carrying a slim little case of them around in her pocket, especially for times when she was approached by someone’s undersecretary and informed that she’d been reassigned to something called Project Rebirth, and would be flying to America in the morning, 0600 sharp.

 _Don’t shoot the messenger_ , she reminded herself, and smiled blandly at the man who delivered the telegram. She liked being able to go places and do new things, but she found that she preferred being in the middle of things more than being on the fringe of them, and America, in her worldly opinion, was about as fringe as the war effort could get: an ocean apart from the action, churning out victory garden tomatoes and young men but not much else.

So she smiled again, tucked the note into her purse and went outside to puff angrily on a skinny and hastily rolled cigarette, muttering curses to herself when the cheap paper unraveled, spilling tobacco and ash on the ground at her feet.

Howard Stark never let her forget that the first words he ever heard her speak were “bloody fucking hell, Pegs, get yourself together,” which was embarrassing on the count of her being caught talking to herself as well as the language, but Peggy wasn’t in the habit of letting herself be embarrassed about too much for too long.

It turned out that Howard, blindingly irritating and charming by turns, as well as given to being obscure in his brilliance and downright infuriatingly arrogant, was also the exact sort of fellow that Peggy liked to make friends with.

They got along rather well and on the flight to New York he taught her how to count cards while playing poker.

“I already know how to play this game,” she sighed when he dealt their first hand. “Soldiers play cards. I work with soldiers. Ergo, I can play most kinds of poker.”

“Oh sure,” Howard said, laying out her cards. “But I’m going to teach you how not to lose, and that is a different game entirely.”

Peggy payed attention because she did _not_ like to lose, and nine months later had the extreme satisfaction of winning every single dime off of James Barnes, as well as his shirt.

*

America, it turned out, was not at all what she had expected, and Peggy found herself falling deeply in love with New York; the breath of salt water from the wharf mixed with the strange metal smell of sunshine reflected off of shop windows and asphalt. Peggy was born in London, spent most of her formative years in a flat overlooking a traffic circle, and never felt quite so at home as when she could reliably breath in the heavy scent of petrol and engines. Then there was the scurry of people, the unending frolic of life that teemed from every shop and corner, and the peculiar light feeling of not knowing what language she would hear when she turned a new street.

It seemed, however unlikely, that there was perhaps some truth to the city’s patron and her anthem, the huddled teeming masses with their faces lifted in hope, heads held high with an idea and a dream.

She learned how to buy her lunch with a dime at automats, ate banana pie with coffee whenever she felt like it, chatted up the men at newspaper stands and women at the green grocers, and had the enormous pleasure of dressing down military men in secret facilities around the city, while working with Howard and the relevant New York municipalities to ensure that the as-of-yet unexplained Project Rebirth would have access to adequate electricity.

On morning she came into work and found, in what was by now a predictable pattern, two train tickets sitting on her desk.

“We’re going to New Jersey,” Phillips said from his desk. He didn’t look up from his reading, but adjusted the set of his glasses with one finger, and took a long drink from a mug set at his right hand. “Going to see the recruits. Hope you’re ready for some new meat; I know how you like to break in the boys.”

Peggy grinned, because she did.

Fort Lehigh was in the middle of a not-quite forest: a picturesque sort of place with grassy fields and short trees, and rows and rows of low rounded barracks, long buildings with tin doors, and crisscrossed everywhere with dirt trails scattered with empty rifle shells.

It had been a long time since Peggy had seen any wildlife other than a pigeon. There were birds, always birds, _everywhere_ , chattering and whistling and singing, which was at first surprising, and second the cause of a wave of sentimentality that nearly brought her to tears when she woke one morning to grey light and birdsong, convinced for a moment that she was at her grandparent’s farm in Surrey.

 _Woodthrush and starling_ , she thought, frozen in place as though the music would stop if she so much as rustled the blankets. With her eyes closed, she could see the pictures in her grandfather’s field guide, the lithographs still clear on faded yellow paper.

She also saw a lot of red foxes, and many, many fit young men in their undershirts, which was one of the unspoken pleasures of joining the army. If she was going to have her legs leered at during all hours, Peggy was going to enjoy the sight of as many straining pectorals as God would allow.

Her sharpshooting improved, as did her French, her skill at code breaking, and her right hook, which came in handy more times that she personally felt was necessary, but which proved to be immensely gratifying anyway.

And she met Steve Rogers, who watched her with careful respect, had a dry sense of humor and a serious face, but who also laughed at her jokes, and threw himself into his work (and, memorably, onto a grenade) without hesitation and with uncommon vigor. For such a small person, he radiated determination; he was a beacon, Peggy thought: carelessly idealistic and terribly stubborn. If he had been even slightly less skittish, he would have charmed her out of her blouse in a hot minute.

Instead, Project Rebirth succeeded. To a degree.

Abraham Erskine was laid to rest, Steve Rogers went on the press circuit, and Peggy returned to the front, brimming with unease and the sense of something left unfinished.

*

In Greece she went undercover, posing as the wife of major. The major was a Welshman called Marc, and he was her height exactly when she wore heels, so she could look him in the eye and say things like “Darling, I think I’d like a house on the sea someday,” while swinging her hand in his as they snooped, nonchalant and sunwarm through the market, or “Darling, there’s a sniper in the third floor window,” which was when she pushed a gaping Marc down to the ground, and how she earned her first real war injuries: shotgun pellets in her shoulder, and a twisted ankle.

Immediately afterward, while she lay on the cobblestone sidewalk and blinked blearily at the blue sky and the whitewashed clouds, she couldn’t help but think morosely that the incident meant she was probably not going to be allowed out in the field again any time soon.  

She was right and also wrong: Phillips yelled about appropriate mission protocol for an hour when she was released from the medics tent, but a week later she was given her first field promotion, and a new assignment in Italy.

Italy was a mess.

Briefings came in throughout the summer of 1943 as the Italian campaign started at the tip of the boot and pushed a slow and brutal path through the leg, hacking through the remains of the Axis forces in both the metaphorical and literal sense of word. Peggy was not unaccustomed to the violence of war - she had been in the thick of things before, and had the still healing scars to prove it - but Italy was where she learned what the inside of a man’s head looked like when it was no longer completely attached, one instance of many where there was nothing to be done but keep moving, the SSR skating around the military machine as it pushed ever forward.

It was never clearer to her - the cognitive distance between glossy posters and the solid, staid faces of soldier doing their duty and the reality of war as it was: an ugly, brutal mess, wet and muddy and bloody, and Peggy lost count of how many times she woke to sirens and screaming, eyes burning over the names of lost men and the unending reel of condolence letters typed in the dark.

In the mornings she smoothed her hair back, powdered her nose and applied the good English stiff upper lip (as well as a helping of red lipstick) and got back to work.

There was always work to be done.

She was still in Italy when she had her 24th birthday late in November of 1943, spitting mad over new reports of Hydra activity, and trying to drown out the idea of 400 lost men in Azzano with black market whiskey and Howard Stark in a leaking tent a few miles from the active front.

“You shouldn’ even be here, you great idiot,” she said, tossing back the bottle and suppressing the urge to cough at the burn of liquor on her tongue. “Flying through a warzone, you bloody ass; what would we have done if you’d been shot?” She considered the whiskey label for a moment, swallowing around the unexpected lump in her throat.

Howard grabbed the bottle from her. “I don’t get shot, sweetheart,” he said, and laughed when she swatted at him. “I’m the best.”

“You’re something,” Peggy muttered, and rested her head on her folded arms. “Happy Birthday to me.”

Howard patted her on the back awkwardly, but also left her a finger’s worth of rotgut at the bottom of the bottle when he wandered off for the evening. She sipped on it, decided it was disgusting, and poured the rest out on the way to her tent.

In the morning, she woke up with less of a hangover than she’d expected, but with enough fuzz between her ears to be thoroughly confused to find the camp strewn everywhere with red and white and blue ribbons.

A tiny blonde woman scurried past her on the way to the makeshift showers, her hair in curlers, and Peggy had a sudden bright recollection of a USO tour poster in a bar.

“Oh _hell_ ,” she said.

“Nope, still Italy,” said Phillips, who was passing.

*

Steve Rogers pulled rank - which he did not even technically _have_ \- with what Peggy would say later was a something akin to glee, and jumped out of Howard’s plane wearing a reckless grin and an actual, ridiculous target strapped to his back. She watched him fall into the darkness and tried not to think too much about the flash of explosions lighting up around them in the sky; Steve disappeared in seconds, and something in her chest clenched uncomfortably.

It was a terribly inconvenient time to realize she might be able to fall in love with him, Peggy thought, before scrambling unsteadily back into her seat and strapping in, the canvas belts and buckles heavy on her shoulders.

Howard maneuvered the plane out of the immediate danger of anti-aircraft fire, pushed his flight goggles up over his forehead and gave her a thorough look.

“Raincheck on the fondue, eh?” He said, twiddling a dial on the dash. There was a shift as the plane redirected by a couple of degrees, and Peggy nodded a bit helplessly and wished she’d brought her packet of cigarettes.

*

She did fall in love with him, eventually, and it _was_ inconvenient, but it was also sort of wonderful, to have something burning and happy battering around in her chest.

Italy (Monte Cassino, Anzio, Ortona; endless others along the damned Winter Line) had dampened that, the Blitz and the bombs and the whispers of unspeakable things, of horrors into the north beyond her capacity to imagine them. Margaret Carter left her house on a rainy afternoon in 1936 with an idea and never looked back, and hadn’t exactly noticed the transformation from impetuous and bored teenager striking out blindly for a reason, any reason, to live and to be, into an adult woman in 1944 standing, in her own way, in front of the German army, in front of indignity, abuse and terror, and a blind unaccountable hatred, screaming out in fury because it was her world and it was supposed to be better.

Peggy hadn’t known how badly she needed something to hope for until it was there in front of her. It had gotten away from her a little: purpose shrouded by missions and disguises and objectives ticked off a bit of paper in soggy meetings and the endless bitter march to the north.

Who knew hope could look so much like a six foot something blonde (formerly a five foot something blonde) that fought by slinging around a round vibranium shield and who liked to kill time by learning new ways to ride tricks on his motorcycle?

Steve stood out for the same things she did, for the better world, and she loved that about him first.

He also slipped back into a Brooklyn accent when he forgot himself, which was not often, but which Peggy found unspeakably endearing.

“I’d like your picture,” he said one evening. They were alone in the office - well, mostly: James Barnes was asleep in the corner, leaning back in his chair with one arm flung over his eyes and snoring softly - but for all purposes, alone, staring at the map on the wall. Occasionally Steve would reach over and move a pin a fraction, huffing a little, and scribbling notes to himself in a tiny pocket notebook he carried.

“You want my what?” Peggy slung her feet off the desk.

Steve looked mildly embarrassed. “Your picture. For, uh, when I’m away?”

“You want something to remember me by when you’re on missions?” Peggy asked, standing now to hide the fact that she was momentarily gobsmacked.

“Well. Yes.” Steve started to gather the papers off the desk, stacking them haphazardly.

“There are pictures in my file,” Peggy said slowly, watching him fret with some amusement. “You could have always just fetched one, I know you have access.”

Steve sighed, and looked up, focusing in on her face. It was disconcerting to be looked at like that, Peggy thought. The entire focus of Steve Roger’s attention was really something. “I could have,” he said. “But I thought you would prefer it if I asked, first.”

Peggy blinked. “You’re welcome to them,” she said. “But if you really want something to remember, you can do better than a picture.”

“Wait, what?” said Steve, right before she kissed him.

*

The Howling Commandos were crazy. _Crazy_.

She adored them all.

*

The air was smoke and ash, harsh in her throat, bitter on her tongue, and Peggy stumbled more than once on her way, the rubble of another street crumbling beneath her feet.

Steve crumbled too.

He held one of her hands, gently, far more gently than she expected, emptied two more bottles of cheap rum before giving it up, and covered his face when he cried, one hand over his eyes and the other turning over her fingers, thumb rubbing her knuckles.

Peggy was far more accustomed to mourning on her own, a private grief that she was loathe to share, and anyway, it was 1945 - there were days when she felt like she was running out of people to grieve for, the whole of the earth on fire or under water even as they neared something like a victory.

Steve Rogers cried for James Barnes without shame, shaking silently next to her in a burned out shell of a bar, and Peggy wept for him too - she liked James, had always respected him, all dry wit and faintly ridiculous devotion - but she loved Steve, loved his whole heart and when it broke she was shocked to find hers in pieces also.

“Phillips says the Allies are in Warsaw,” said Steve later, voice dull and raspy against the skin on the back of her neck. He was curled around her, one hand around her waist and the other stretched over their heads on his tiny army issue cot. Peggy opened her eyes and glanced at the small clock resting on the rickety folding bedside table; Steve had it balanced on a stack of books, mostly military theory, but novels too, dog eared with worn spines. It ticked softly in the quiet.

They had been laying here for hours, fully clothed minus her shoes and Steve’s coat and tie, dozing, exhausted and drifting. She reached up and patted the skin under her  eyes: puffy. Her cheeks were tight with tear stains, and when she twisted around, Steve’s were too.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve heard. And Paris too. It’s almost over, Steve.”

He blinked at her, chest rising with a deep breath that he let out long over the top of her head. “I thought we were going to do it, Pegs. I thought - we were _so close_.”

 _You have done it_ , she thought, but didn’t dare say; it wasn’t what he meant, and she knew it. _We did, together. All of us._

“I know,” she whispered, instead.

*

Peggy remembered reading about them in school, the Valkyries. Women on winged horses riding over the battlefields, armor drenched in blood and spears shot full of lightning, choosing who would live and who would die; it was the occupation of gods, not a burden for mankind, nothing that should ever chosen by creatures whose lives are a whim of conscience.

Peggy had been at both ends of a gun. She’d held them steady, leveled into the eyes of another human being and she’d pulled the trigger - confident then that it had meant something (even if the something was ‘which of us will walk away from this’), her absolution in the surety that this too would pass, would end.

The roadster teetered on the precipice of the runway, front wheels squealing while the back tires spun into nothingness, and Peggy stood, mindless of the precarious balance, of Phillips’ voice yelling at her to sit down, and watched as Schmidt’s plane shot off into the west, a black dot against the clear sky.

He had his mythology wrong, she thought, adrenaline high, scared and giddy. Schmidt, so obsessed with the idea of gods, of the monsters of old - no being in the pantheon comes as Death itself, a plague to blindly destroy.

That was ever the task of men.

(Stalingrad, Berlin. Normandy, the Ardennes.)

The Valkyrie were not the bringers of death. They merely choose the fates of the already fallen.

Peggy hunched over the radio until she was stiff with cold and grief, and thought bitterly that if she could make choice then, a Valkyrie herself shining great and grim, she would choose, she would choose, _choose_ -

The receiver slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. It was better, perhaps, that she was only human.

*

The streets teemed with people, quite possibly more than Peggy had ever seen at once, a mass of noise, waving banners and kicking through the clouds of ticker tape that covered the cobblestones, hedges, and benches that lined the river Thames.

In the distance, she could hear the strains of a brass band; somewhere else, fireworks - or perhaps someone's pistol - were going off, even though it was only just past four o’clock, and the sun was piercing through the thick layer of London clouds.

Peggy and Howard sat together on a low stone wall that overlooked the water, watching as people poured out of their homes, and out into the neighborhoods on foot or by car, bicycles and motorbikes. For that moment they were quiet, a single newspaper sitting between them, the headline blaring in bold letters: NAZIS SURRENDER; VICTORY IN EUROPE SECURED.

Howard was dripping wet, river water streaming out of his shoes.

"I feel like I should pinch myself," Peggy said eventually. "You think about something for so long, and it doesn't feel real, exactly, does it?" Even as she said it, it was a lie: there was a distinct feeling settled deep in her chest - something that begged to be let out, to jump, to shout, to cry - it was burgeoning, too big to name, significant in a way she had never felt before. It made her want to laugh, so she did: head thrown back and mouth open, cackling until the pressure lightened, until she could breathe again.

She hiccuped, straightening her jacket, and glanced again at Howard, who was watching her with a fond expression. It was, she realized, possibly the first time she'd laughed in two months.

Two months. Eight years. A lifetime, practically. She was 25 years old.

"Good god," she said. "What on earth are we going to do now?"

It was a rhetorical question, but Howard shrugged, shedding water. "Work's not over, you know."

"Obviously."

“You gonna stay with the SSR?” He asked, kicking his heels against the worn stone; a strangely childish gesture, Peggy thought, and somewhat unlike his usual suave facade. The blooming black eye and his hair in wet spikes certainly didn’t help, but it was, perhaps as real as Howard Stark ever was, and she found herself oddly touched.

Peggy considered his question for a moment, squinting at the glare on the water. “I expect. They’ll be headquartered in New York. I do like the city.”

Howard chuckled. “I have a couple of spare rooms, if you need a place.”

“Not in a million years, Howard,” Peggy said, but she was smiling. The city around them was alive, bright and joyful; for a day, just a day, the rubble and the heartache and the sorrow would fade into the middle distance, and so she lifted her face to the west, to the afternoon sun.  

“I rather think I’ll find my own way.”

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
